The Traveler: A Sudden Memory of Terror

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

Transcript

At this moment, dear reader, I realize I am doing something the habit of which I have been trying to break. I am paying too much attention to the external, the tangible, while my purpose in writing this long and at times meandering account has been to expose my inner purpose, my inner experience, so that you might come to know me as a person like yourself, a person who has some skills and knowledge but is at rock bottom also just an overgrown child, prone to the same fears and self-doubts as anyone, hesitating at the doorway of a commander just as a child hesitates at the doorway of the office of the school principal, or as an employee halts at the door of his superior in business, or as anyone about to go out into the weather halts to take in the smell of the air, and pauses there, and a memory flashes into his head and he recalls something not thought of in years, a chance meeting on a warm Florida beach, the town of St. Petersburg, he thinks of St. Petersburg, Florida, and then of the St. Petersburg in Russia and of a time there when the utmost in stealth was required, and in the space of an instant he relives a moment of terror and triumph, he feels himself running down that alley he ran down that time, hears the bullets striking the wall behind him and the ground under his feet as he flees, and sees the helicopter coming into the field he is running toward, and can, in that instant, still feel the burning of the rope in his hand as he grabbed it and was lifted up into the cold steel body of the copter and he can still see the face of his opponent who rounded the corner just as the copter turned and raced away, and then it goes blank as it always does as he gets to that moment because that is when, so they tell him, that he fainted dead away and spent two days in an amnesiac state, unable to remember his name or anything except a kind of tea he had drunk in St. Petersburg, an exquisite cup of Assam given him in a restaurant shortly before this episode, a taste he had never found again, a taste which held a hint of something psychoactive, which would have explained some but not all of the extraordinary vividness of the memory.